Have me banned
, but IMHO all kinds of overdrives and boosts are built by people who do not care or not have much of a clue. They copy 70 years old schematics, put 5$ parts into a box and sell that for way too much money. That's ok because most buyers do not have a clue as well. The signal to noise ratio of these devices is ridiculous and if you put these devices in front of channel 3 of a vh4, you'll notice how damn quiet such a Diezel amp is... without the pedal! The little increase in gain and tone coloration is usually accompanied by disproportional background noise.
All these things really do is add lots of white noise (if you are lucky). One booster that does not seem to do that is the MK.4.23 - CLEAN BOOST PEDAL.
"Lower than -115dBu noise floor. Over 140dB signal to noise ratio possible!" I haven't tried it myself, though.
I've tried lots of expensive buffers only to find out that the buffer in the tc polytune is the most quiet one I found. The expensive Mesa stuff is a joke and noisy as hell.
I was really taken aback by what inferior stuff is advertised as a pristine studio quality device.